Growing Carrots in Your Spanish Garden

Carrot - Zanahoria

Carrots are a good all year round vegetable. Great for salads, either sliced or grated, handy as crudites - for dipping into alioli or other dips, in winter time as a boiled vegetable or in caseroles.

This is another vegetable that I would grow in a double row i.e. in two rows about 15cm apart with a wider gap between each pair of rows.
As carrot seed is very small in size, they will need to be sown shallow, no more than a centimetre, in fine moist soil. One of the difficulties with growing carrots can be keeping the small shallow seed sufficiently moist for germination and establishment in warm dry weather. They may need watering two or three times a day until they have germinated and established roots.

Carrots ready to harvest

Aim at sowing the seed thinly, the ideal would be around 1 cm spacing. Once fully established, they can be thinned to around 5 - 8 cm spacing.
Seeds can be sown from spring to summer, though the problem of keeping the seeds and seedling moist will become greater as you go into summer.

The carrots you grow yourself always appear to be much sweeter than those you buy in the shops and in the summer, we love them in salads or cut into sticks for dipping into alioli

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